With the popularity of mobile phones, security requirements and privacy requirements to the mobile phones are increasing gradually. Short messages are an important communication means, and privacy requirement of the short message have attracted more and more attentions from users.
Currently, short messages received by terminals (such as mobile phones) are saved automatically into the mobile phones. To keep short messages private, users need to click a “menu”, and select a “delete” option to delete the short message. For some mobile phones, the short messages may then be moved to a trash can after a first deletion. Thus, to clear the short messages thoroughly, the user needs to go to the trash can to delete the firstly-deleted short messages again. Such operations are troublesome for users. Furthermore, for a received short message, if the received short message is saved, all contents included in the received short message are saved, and if the received short message is deleted, all contents included in the short message are deleted. A user cannot choose to delete parts of the contents included in the received short message. Thus, it is inconvenient for the users.
Therefore, how to delete only parts of the content included in short messages according to choices of the users is problematic.